On this page I repeat some themes. Mein Kampf, Hitler’s rant, is often described as repetitive so I try to avoid it but unfortunately the religions of the world are for ever seeking to blame and a fresh response is necessary which may go over old ground. My apologies go to those familiar with this web site.
Aggressive Secularism is a term you may here from papist and protestant sources. It is really just another way of saying what the Muslims label, ‘the infidel’ or the Jews, ‘the gentiles’. It is those who disagree but will not roll over and allow themselves to be walked over. The terms are used because the claim of each religion is that their beliefs are self-evident therefore any mild mannered rebuttal is taken as aggression.
It is a clever use of words and also a way of dissociating from the systems they have preferred, capitalist as opposed to communist. Some commentators will claim that the liberation of Poland from communism was due to the efforts of catholic believers and the priesthood. However, now they are constructing aggressive pig and chicken factory farms in Poland but the church is amking no sacrificial efforts to stop that. Typically the religious, who guess at things, will use the example of the twentieth century as a way of illustrating how bad secular belief can be, citing the first and second wars and communist revolutions, (despite the religious thirty year war in Europe being far more an act of self-destruction as I have pointed out elsewhere in this site).
In fact religious people are using what may be styled as aggressive marketing techniques, seemingly eternally by grabbing children at an early age and claiming their loyalty by various forms of brain-washing and neural linguistic programming, (NLP), but also by other methods, such as religious universities in the USA preparing their under-graduates for political roles in Washington including the Republican party.
One of the classic methods is to use the idea of human rights as part of law which must be earned and requires obligations. This in England for instance, may be put forward by politicians such as Tony Blair from his egotistical Christian standpoint or Jack Straw as an older Jew turning from his secular youth to a more family oriented and Talmudic centric philosophy. The former is a typical standpoint of Christians which is often characterised by the aggressive threat, that they and their Messiah are making an offer, like a gift, but if you don’t accept that offer they will oversee your eternal torture, (interesting to note the George W Bush has just admitted as I write this (November 2010), that he advocated waterboarding and presumably by default other forms of torture, as did Jack Straw at one time when he declared evidence obtained by torture in other countries as legitimate in UK business. Jack Straw still illustrates his unreformed communist past by advocating prisons when the supposed evil conservatives are advocating alternative reform. This is akin to his support for Russia in the past and its vile gulag system of punishment. Bush claimed it was to defend US citizens that he advocated torture, but since we have now discovered via Wikileaks the extent of deaths and abuse in Iraq, (over 100,000 confirmed deaths let alone all the others unrecorded and the deaths from malnutrition and poor hospital treatment), one has to wonder why he does not ban the car in the US and torture anybody driving one since that results in so many deaths in the US. In truth he is excusing his sadistic dreams of an after life in heaven mocking unbelievers by trying to justify exactly the practices of the Nazis which shock us and as a by-product encourage the war of Islamic extremism. He almost certainly believes the worst he can expect when he gets to heaven is a spanking of his mother).
The principle of the law as a way of manipulating opinions by those who would dominate us with their politics, (rather than serve us as good politicians should), is challenged by the observable behaviour of the rutting stag as an example. Deer have no laws and nor did our ancestors. As the page on the law describes, law is a convenience of civilisation, not an ultimate.
The path of Buddha is truly non-aggressive and we are of sufficient intelligence and power , (through education and our use of tools and communication systems,) to restrain our worst Darwinian impulses and practice co-operative effort to preserve this wonderful biodiverse planet we have evolved on. We really only have to look, love sufficiently for sincere friendship to grow and have compassion for species less able to adapt to the industry we impose, frequently rather too heavily.
Currently, while priests and vicars may take roles in society that can be characterised by medium or low impact footprints in an ecological sense, the congregations they stand for a very much high impact, typically poorer religions seeking advancement through numbers and richer religions through ownership and domination of intellectual, political and economic life, (A certain British transport company was started by an overtly Christian couple but characterised by aggressive take-overs, in Russia initially seven, (to my knowledge), of the top ten billionaires to emerge after the fall of the iron curtain were Jewish despite the claim to have been deprived under the soviets). But to come to the point of this paragraph, looking at Jesus and the occasion where he is said to have withered an olive tree. This is taken as an example of why modern Christians reading this would nod sagely and say that is why I failed to continue my education to get a degree, because the withering is an analogy of how Jesus treats people who go to church but do not spread the message, I am in that analogy a barren tree. The facts are I felt I was being turned into a thoughtless and barren tree in the church and left to think things over but a decision had already been taken to eliminate me I believe, probably because my education in my early years, provided by my dad additionally to my schooling, had convinced me of issues like life on other planets, evolution, the age of the earth etc.. In fact by withering the tree Jesus demonstrates a contempt for evolution and biodiversity. Now that the news of Darwin is around the world, all life which demonstrates evolution to a scientist is a threat to the word of God, which is largely lies where science is concerned in stories such as creation, Noah etc. Therefore if animals, especially vertebrates since they are the complex links between man and the oceans from which our ancestor species emerged, are in the way of the word being spread, then Jesus will be happy to see every last tiger, lion, giraffe , ape, monkey, wolf, bird of prey and reptile etc., become extinct. The key is that the belief in Christ is that no other life, except that of the believer, is valid or has a right to peace, freedom and life. The believers can comfort themselves too, by believing their God would recreate the creatures if he wanted to, after the great judgment day, even if they do go extinct temporarily. Thus they gain permission to engage in aggressive capitalism or materialism, (since socialists would do the same), to destroy all places where wild creatures exist, in order to further the maxim “go forth and dominate the earth”.